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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

To me this sounds horribly unsafe. You are lulled into this state where you don't have to pay attention to steering UNLESS you have to pay attention to steering, and you will find this out suddenly. So if you always have to pay attention, even when the system is active, then what exactly is the point of the system in the first place? Wouldn't it be safer to always pay attention?

I guess this is an empirical question. Is it just as safe to (a) not pay attention until suddenly you have to pay attention, vs (b) pay attention all the time?

I suppose the sudden aspect of (a) is the dangerous part.

On the other hand the constant vigilance demand of (b) is also dangerous (we know people are bad at staying vigilant for long periods of time when a stimulus doesn't change much)

Does anyone know of any peer reviewed published work on this?

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I was actually thinking that may be the case, but (anecdata warning!) after switching to a car with lane assist + adaptive cruise control (so similar to the described one I think), I can concentrate on the road ahead much more now. I didn't realise how tiring the "normal driving" is until now. The ability to stop glancing at the dashboard to check speed and not working that hard to turn (even comparing to assisted steering) is amazing.

You may think those things are in muscle memory, but actually they do tire you out. Even after a 1h drive, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.

unless heavy traffic on highway, this is already achievable for me with usual cruise control (I did few home trips that are 1500km far within 1 day - tiring but doable... 1 hour is a breeze in good car).

if in heavy traffic, I turn off cruise control anyway, you better focus properly.

I was once in an accident caused by the driver using cruise control. My driver had his feet relaxed and off the pedals when a car swerved in front of us.. he reacted by going to hit the brakes and because his feet were not in a position where he knew the relative position of the pedals, he hit the accelerator instead of the brake. We swerved off the highway down an embankment at 75-80mph. We were all very lucky to be relatively uninjured, but to this day I refuse to touch cruise control or any other automated driving features. I don't know if modern adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance would have helped in my case, but I really, really don't trust a driver who is relaxed and not being constantly vigilant.

When driving with cruise control, I have a habit to lightly touch the brake pedal once in a while (without actually braking) to "warm up" my muscle memory for emergency situation.

Some references here: http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/sites/hal.pratt.duke.edu/files/u7/...

There are various other papers from the same lab.

awesome thanks

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